For years, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been trying to boost the success rate of Black scientists who apply for grants by offering training and mentoring programs. Yet their funding rate still lags behind that of white investigators for reasons that many suspect include racial bias.
Now, three of NIH’s 24 grantmaking institutes are trying a more direct approach. In a recent notice, they are encouraging Black investigators and others from underrepresented groups to fill out a box that flags their application and brings it to a program officer’s attention. Then, even if the quality score that peer-review panels award the proposal falls outside the cutoff for most grants, institute directors may fund the project if they decide the applicant’s diverse background strengthens the research.
The notice could help address “disparities for certain groups when it comes to” awarding NIH’s basic grant, the R01, wrote Wanda Jones-London, chief of workplace diversity at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) in a June article in Neurology Today. Some NIH observers are welcoming the approach, but are frustrated that it has not been embraced across all of NIH.
In 2011, University of Kansas, Lawrence, economist Donna Ginther led a study that found Black scientists’ success rate for R01 grants was about 10 percentage points below that for equally qualified white scientists. NIH’s latest analysis shows the so-called Ginther gap persists: In 2020, Black principal investigators had a 24% success rate compared with 31% for white PIs. Some scientists, including University of California, San Diego, drug abuse researcher Michael Taffe, have argued the gap would shrink if each NIH institute simply funded a couple more applications from Black PIs that score well in peer review but miss the cutoff. In 2020, when 166 R01s went to Black PIs, an additional 50 grants would have erased the gap.
NIH cannot legally make funding decisions based on race or ethnicity. But institutes already routinely fund some grants that miss the cutoff in order to bolster overlooked or high-priority research areas, and they can use the same “select pay” option to encourage “diverse perspectives,” the agency says. This policy is backed, officials say, by a 2019 NIH diversity statement encouraging participation from underrepresented groups, which include people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds as well as racial and ethnic minorities.
In May, NINDS went a step further by issuing the formal notice, which has since been embraced by the drug and alcoholism institutes. It invites applications for R01 grants from “Individuals from Diverse Backgrounds, Including Under-Represented Minorities.” Applicants can note on their proposal that they are responding to the notice. This “will help us to identify grants that bring in those diverse perspectives and inform, in a holistic manner, our funding decisions,” Jones-London wrote.
At NINDS, the notice is “really a call for more applications,” institute Director Walter Koroshetz told Science. He says Black and white applicants have roughly the same success rate at NINDS, but that the institute funds too few Black scientists overall.
Taffe was glad to see the notice, but worries it could backfire by leading peer reviewers to give worse scores to proposals from Black scientists. That’s what happened after NIH launched a program intended to aid early stage investigators: When reviewers realized these applicants might get special treatment, they gave them less favorable scores. NIH must “keep an eye on this” to ensure that history isn’t repeated, Taffe says.
NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, however, has decided other institutes should not join the notice because of concerns it will cause “confusion,” according to an NIH statement. It does not represent “a new concept” because all NIH institutes “have long known they can fund ‘outside the pay line’ for applications that … bring in diverse scientific perspectives,” an NIH spokesperson said.
That decision is disappointing, says University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, biomedical engineer Lola Eniola-Adefeso, who like Taffe sees the notice as useful for flagging Black scientists’ grants and helping NIH staff feel empowered to nominate them for select pay. “Without larger institutes signing on, the notice is useless,” she says.
But Taffe hopes that even if other institutes can’t make R01 proposals from underrepresented PIs a formal program priority, NINDS’s example will prompt them to step up their use of select pay to address the Ginther gap. In August, for example, the National Cancer Institute clarified that diversity is one factor it uses in making select pay decisions. NINDS’s action, Taffe says, “maybe makes more explicit that institutes should use a policy that they could have always used.”
Mark Peifer, a cell biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, agrees. He hopes the notice will “turn up the heat on other institutes and drive culture change.”
Source: Science Mag